Internet search engines provide information about Internet accessible resources (e.g., Web pages, images, text documents, multimedia content) that are responsive to a user's search query by returning, in the case of image searching, a set of image search results in response to the query. A search result includes, for example, a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of an image or of a document containing the image, and a snippet of information. The search results can be ranked (e.g., in an order) according to scores assigned to them by a scoring function. The scoring function ranks the search results according to various signals, for example, where (and how often) query text appears in document text surrounding an image, an image caption, or in alternative text for the image, and how common the query terms are in the search results indexed by the search engine.